The Furies. Katie Lowe

felt my stomach drop; glanced at Robin. ‘I … I haven’t seen her. Why?’

      ‘Well, Stacey – you know Stacey, in the lacrosse team? She broke her finger at a match last Friday night. Which is horrendously bad timing, because we need her for the squad when we play …’ I felt myself dragged into the long and complex history of the school lacrosse team, and nodded dimly, waiting for her to return to the matter in hand. ‘Anyway,’ she said, finally, ‘she was at A&E and she said she saw Grace in the waiting room with Alex, looking like she’d been hit by a bus.’

      ‘She’s fine,’ Robin said. She looked out at the seagulls criss-crossing in the air, diving at unsuspecting tourists clutching fried doughnuts and newsprint-covered chips.

      ‘I don’t know … Bloody nose, black eye … Not that you’d know under all that make-up, mind. It’s a shame, really. She’s got such a pretty face.’

      I shook my head. ‘I haven’t spoken to her. I didn’t know anything had happened.’ I turned to Robin. ‘Did you?’

      ‘No,’ she said, looking down between the broad slats of the pier.

      ‘Well, I thought you might know. Jodie – Jodie with the short hair, the lesbian-looking girl in the upper class – she asked Alex if Grace was okay this morning when she saw her, and Alex said she didn’t know what she was talking about. Which is kind of weird, right? I mean, if she was there and all. Which she must’ve been, because Stacey wouldn’t lie about something like that.’

      I shrugged, though it seemed, based on Nicky’s sideways look, that my attempt at nonchalance was unsuccessful. ‘I’ll let you know if I hear anything,’ I said, at last. This seemed to appease her. Nicky smiled, leaned in to kiss my cheek – an affectation I suspected (though I couldn’t be sure) she’d adopted in some sly imitation of Robin, one’s lips marking the spot where the other’s lipstick had been, before – and bobbed off towards town, boyfriend in tow, leaving the two of us walking silently towards the sea.

      Robin spoke, finally, when we reached the railings, looking out into the nothing. ‘Her dad’s a total psycho.’ She clung on, leaned back, and swung there for a moment, before pulling herself back. ‘Grace’s, I mean. He’s why she’s always got bruises.’

      I turned to face her, a dull sickness rising. ‘He hits her?’

      ‘Yeah,’ she said.

      ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Can’t we—’

      ‘She says it’s not our business. Like, she won’t talk about it. Ever.’

      ‘Oh,’ I said again, uselessly. Silence fell, broken only by the clack and chatter of seagulls swooping above, the waves rattling the pier below. ‘Where’s the party?’ I said, at last, desperate to break the silence. I felt bad for Grace, truly; but my thoughts kept wandering back to Nicky’s other comment. The party. Robin hadn’t said anything, and if Nicky hadn’t brought it up, I wasn’t sure she would’ve mentioned it at all.

      ‘Halloween party,’ she said. ‘My boyfriend’s throwing it. You should meet him.’ She chewed, thoughtfully, at her finger, biting off a hangnail and spitting it into the water below. ‘Lots of boys in his halls, too. You might find one yourself.’

      ‘Halloween isn’t for another week.’

      ‘So?’

      ‘I don’t have a costume.’

      ‘You won’t need one. Wear what you’ve got on now, and no one’ll tell the difference.’

      I threw a bottle cap at her, sand rolling back on the wind. I’d never been with a boy, never so much as kissed one. I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to. I thought back to my old school, scrappy, howling boys who’d tug and paw at the girls who let them, who encouraged them, and who told each other elaborate stories of who loved who, and how they’d fucked. It all seemed a lot of work, even if they had shown any interest in me (which, of course, they hadn’t).

      Still, the prospect of a night with Robin, in what I imagined might be the more sophisticated, mature company of university students, was too tempting to refuse. ‘Can’t wait,’ I said, as the last spark of the sunset clipped the edge of the horizon, and the first brush of night air echoed in the wind.

      The university was on the far side of town, only a couple of miles from the Kirkwood – and it possessed none of the grandeur of the grounds to which I’d by now become somewhat accustomed (though even now I am not wholly immune to the bloom of evening light behind the Campanile, or the froth of raindrops glowing above the Great Hall’s sage and silver dome on a cool spring day). I’d only ever been dimly aware that it existed, and even now never thought of it as a university. It was ‘the old poly’, or ‘the college’, to residents of the town, and I had never thought of it in any other terms.

      All béton brut and gabions, grey crumbling into black, it was impressive, in its own way, and almost a better fit for the town: ugly in a way that seemed to be somehow intentional. Aggressive, even. The tower, indeed, had cut a lonely but ever-present figure in my childhood, the only tower building in the whole town – wide and squat, with gangways connecting its two halves, a ladder leaning on the sky. The leaves hung wincing from the trees, or cracked underfoot, scratching at the pavement; the sky grey and fat with mist, words made visible in the cool night air.

      When Robin and I had met, in the dim lights of the bus station, where the shelters rattled in the evening wind, she’d thrown her arms around me in an overblown hug. ‘You look amazing,’ I said, the words muffled by the crush of her shoulder, the wide, black brim of her witch’s hat.

      ‘I know,’ she said, pulling away. ‘What … What are you meant to be?’

      I tugged at the back of my coat, the blooming flash of red. ‘Red Riding Hood,’ I said, blushing; knowing, already, that it was stupid, a childish idea.

      She laughed. ‘Okay, so, before I say anything else: you are adorable,’ she said, the words shot through and veined with sarcasm. ‘But this is a grown-up party. You need to look the part.’ She pulled me down onto the cold metal seat beside her, and began rooting through her bag, chewing thoughtfully at her smudged, blackened lips.

      An old man, stinking of sweat and stale alcohol, paused to stare as she reached for my chin; instructed me to close my eyes, and hold still. I don’t know how long he stood there, though the smell of him lingered as I sat, waiting, feeling myself watched. And yet the touch of her, the assurance with which she smoothed foundation into my skin, brushed powder gently into the hollows of my eyes; the way she laughed, a little, when she told me to pout, the feel of breath on my skin as she leaned in to paint my lips … It doesn’t matter who sees, I thought. I don’t care.

      ‘There,’ she said, at last. ‘What do you think?’

      I opened my eyes, blinking in the light; caught my reflection in the threaded glass of the windows as the bus shuddered in behind. Eyes lined with soft, smudged kohl, made them wider, their expression somehow no longer mine; lips lined fat, a blooming red. A painted shadow in the hollow of my cheeks.

      I looked wholly unlike myself, somehow, drawn into a new self by her. And as I blinked once, and again, I felt a shudder of recognition. My features made fuller, more vivid, I looked, now, like the taped-up photos of Emily Frost, pocked and faded by the wind.

      ‘Do you like it?’ she said, she, too, watching my reflection in the glass.

      ‘Wow,’ I said, unsure what else to say.

      She talked, almost without pausing for breath, all the way to the campus, flitting from one topic to another. About her little sister, whose obsession with a certain TV show meant Robin had to listen to it playing through the walls in the middle of the night. About a tattoo she’d been thinking of getting, that she’d drawn ‘fifty thousand times’ but couldn’t get quite right. About a horror movie she’d seen but couldn’t remember the name of, though a scene in which a woman had been chopped to pieces had